some writing tricks that work sometimes
Oct. 30th, 2024 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaan annoying thing about Writing Advice™ is that, once you know the basics of “how to write a grammatical sentence” and some general protips like “this is what a plot arc looks like,” “here’s a couple style rules you should probably follow unless you know what you’re doing,” and so on… the most interesting tips sound kind of “wisdom-y” in a way that’s hard to put into practice, and often don’t make sense unless you struggle through writing some stuff yourself. (also, i do sincerely believe the correct answer for most writing questions is “go read a novel that does it well & think about it really hard,” and there’s no real shortcut around that, sorry!)
worse, once you’ve struggled through figuring out how to solve a particular writing problem, you often can’t really express what tip/trick you were using when you solved it. it’s like those veteran birdwatchers who, when you ask how they identified a particular oriole via a 0.5 second glance of a heavily backlit in-flight silhouette, will shrug and say “it just looked like one.” augh!
i think trying to formalize these tips/tricks, as you notice them, can prove useful down the line (as in: when i’m facing a plot dilemma, i’ve occasionally gone down a literal list of “stuff i’ve done that’s worked before” and tried using each and every one, like someone desperately trying to find which screw in the toolbox will fit into a particular bolt). so here’s three new ones i came up with recently; use as you see fit:
VIEWPOINT, PLOT, THEME: PICK TWO GET ONE FREE
a thing i noticed (via reverse-engineering-what-i-did) while writing The Water at the Edge of All Things: when you’re (1) nestled pretty solidly in a character’s viewpoint, and (2) have a good idea of where you’re taking SOME aspect of the plot… then (3) themes will emerge, all on their own, to add depth & narrative coherence all on their own.
example: i had an outline in hand when i was writing chapter 15 of TWatEoAT, right. so i knew that i was at “the scene where Leanne starts charming the general populace & Niko gets anxious about her.” i knew part (2) of that equation.
so i decided that i’d write a scene with Leanne hanging out & singing with some raven hatchlings, because that seemed cute and fun to me and i think she’d be good with kids… but i realized, as i was writing, oh god this is perfect for a lot of reasons, actually.
because, see, i was pretty firmly in Leanne’s PoV at this point, and had been for a while (so, i had part (1) of that equation as well). and a preoccupation of Leanne’s, leading up to that scene, is her figuring out how she’s supposed to exert power/influence, not by having power of her own, but by influencing those around her… and i realized i could make that power a *literal thing* by having the raven kiddos’ songs enhance Leanne’s own galdrar-magic-stuff. and FURTHERMORE, it serves as an implicit foil to Reyson's arc, because Reyson’s whole problem for his chapters is that he’s been grasping too tightly to what he has, while pushing away everyone else, and since things keep slipping away from him, that just means he’s making his world smaller and colder until he’s the only one left.
i didn’t need to (consciously) think that hard about worldbuilding stuff or thematic stuff before i wrote that—most the Serenes magic stuff was strictly made up on the fly—but that’s fine, because that stuff should be complimenting the other two things anyway, and you can fill it in as needed. it felt like "magic" when i was writing it but i'd clearly set up the groundwork without realizing it.
(i suspect this is part of why e.g. NK Jemisin has said before she doesn’t know whether or not she’ll be able to finish any given novel until she has ~10-20k words of a really solid voice nailed down. voice implies a specific viewpoint; viewpoint implies a specific kind of story/plot; once you have those, the rest gets filled in.)
((incidentally i suspect this is some of my beef with the sorts of novels that e.g. nanowrimo tends to produce, or writers who generally write really fast but it feels like “nothing happens” in their stories… it always feels like “and this happened AND THEN this happened AND THEN this happened…” and that’s a weakness in a very basic kind of way, but i think the root cause is that they haven’t really inhabited any given character’s viewpoint properly? so it ends up a Sequence Of Stuff Happening. maybe. idk.))
THROW IN FUN BITS HERE AND THERE, I THINK? ESPECIALLY BIT CHARACTERS?
in TWatEoAT, when i wrote Hakna in chapter 2, i honestly did not expect to use her again. i made her cool, because if i’m going to have to have a bit character to fill in some technical information, i may as well make her FUN AS HELL, and i made Muro have a crush on her because i think it’s fun when young gents are into cougars actually. i had no further plans for either of them.
but the fact that they both existed helped me out bigtime in later chapters. when i was writing Leanne’s stuff, i was like, “damn, this is too grim/bleak/stagnant if she has no one else to talk to...” and that’s when i remembered i did have one Ancient-speaking character around, hey! what happens if she talks to Leanne?
and since i’d gone to the effort of thinking a bit about where Hakna “fit” in this world (advisor-ly type, too smart to get involved in politics, more worldly than most ravens, presumably has survived a lot of political upheaval in the past, etc), it didn’t even feel that random, slotting her in—and she started enhancing the thematic/narrative structure, all on her own. (because, well, “stuff the author personally thinks is cool” is one of many things that adds up to create a story’s theme, just by the undercurrents attached to whatever they happen to find cool, but also, if the character reflects the worldbuilding the author's already got going, and that worldbuilding is also intertwined with The Larger Thing The Author Is Trying To Say, then it’ll enhance that, too.)
and if a bit character proves truly extraneous, hey, you can always take them out or reduce their role in your next draft. it probably makes more sense to tend toward overwriting rather than underwriting with these sorts of roles.
THREE IS THE BIGGEST NUMBER
i mentioned Muro earlier. he was even more of a bit character when i first introduced him. he was the designated Kinda Dim But Perfectly Nice guy on Naesala’s council who filled in a niche in a board room meeting. ho hum.
but once i was in the post-Serenes-fire part of the story, i realized (…very early on, it looks like, based on my notes; i might’ve just intuited a lot of this rather than consciously thinking it through) that a bunch of scenes with Renzo hanging out with a convalescing Naesala would be dead on the page by themselves. there was only so much of a shit Renzo was going to give, and “you should do [x],” “i won’t,” “okay well i tried. bye forever” does not interesting narrative tension make.
but add a third person and suddenly you have a combinatorial jump in interesting possibilities. what’s Naesala think of Muro, what’s he think of Renzo, what’s he think of them *together*, what do Renzo and Muro think of each other, what are they all willing to say around the other two versus just one of them, etc. so he was *mechanically* important, just to give the other two someone to play off of, and then that section kinda wrote itself. (and Muro took on way more of a life of his own, as a result, which was a wonderful and happy surprise.)
anyway, i recently had a chat with a Very Accomplished Author who suggested something similar when i was trying to debug an origfic novel outline i’m working on, and it totally blew my mind because omg the new possibilities! and she was just like. yeah. three is an incredibly powerful number. a triangle is an incredibly powerful shape. yes love triangles are annoying but there’s a reason there’s so many of them!!!
okay those are the three formalisms i came up with. but i guess i’ll mention the other one that i did not come up with, but which i use all the time:
GIVE YOUR READERS WHAT THEY’RE EXPECTING, BUT NOT THE WAY THEY EXPECT IT
this is probably kind of basic bitch advice, but it’s my most reliable “tool” for fixing a plot, a sort of Swiss army knife that i reach for over and over. if i’m staring at a thing, and i don’t know what should happen next, i’m like “okay what would a random reader think is going to happen,” and then i ask “how can i do that exact thing, but with a twist.” this maxim's vagueness is where it gets a lot of its power! you can use this for everything from “planning a huge massive twist in your heist outcome” to “how can i make this random filler board meeting scene at least slightly unusual/interesting.”
(i got this tip from a very highfalutin MFA-instructor type who wrote very quiet stories where almost nothing happens, btw, hahaha. his class was great overall but i think this was the single best tip i got out of it tbh)
examples of when i’ve used this trick off the top my head:
* in a recent origfic short i wrote, it looks like the skrunky little underling is going to go assassinate someone to solve a “problem,” but it turns out he just uses blackmail instead. (he’s being very GRIM going into this—he’s not a guy used to doing sketchy stuff!—so when he's FREAKING OUT and BUILDING HIMSELF UP TO DO THE THING, we assume he’s about to do a Violence. but he’s also a shy nerd who Knows Too Much, so it totally makes sense that he’d figure out some cool shy nerd way to deal with the problem, e.g. blackmail.)
* in a different origfic novella, i’m building up a thing the whole time where these two young temple acolytes are bonding, and the dude!acolyte is constantly bitching about how he’d like to escape the temple, and the chick!acolyte is more uncertain about it, but is pretty on board with Whatever This Dude Says. so the reader’s expecting them to eventually find a way to escape, and probably expecting something to go wrong… but they don’t necessarily expect that *he’s* going to be the one to balk. she finds a way out and he's like "uhhh... actually... i kind of like it here... it's not THAT bad..." turns out this dude is all talk; turns out he’s too much of a wimpy coward to actually *do* anything about the thing he’s bitching about, and it's a big turn!
do these seem like obvious outs to you? MAYBE. but i needed to think through them this way, at least a little bit, so.
okay, that's the end of cringe writing advice from a random internet fanfiction person, you may resume your normal reading pages now :P
worse, once you’ve struggled through figuring out how to solve a particular writing problem, you often can’t really express what tip/trick you were using when you solved it. it’s like those veteran birdwatchers who, when you ask how they identified a particular oriole via a 0.5 second glance of a heavily backlit in-flight silhouette, will shrug and say “it just looked like one.” augh!
i think trying to formalize these tips/tricks, as you notice them, can prove useful down the line (as in: when i’m facing a plot dilemma, i’ve occasionally gone down a literal list of “stuff i’ve done that’s worked before” and tried using each and every one, like someone desperately trying to find which screw in the toolbox will fit into a particular bolt). so here’s three new ones i came up with recently; use as you see fit:
VIEWPOINT, PLOT, THEME: PICK TWO GET ONE FREE
a thing i noticed (via reverse-engineering-what-i-did) while writing The Water at the Edge of All Things: when you’re (1) nestled pretty solidly in a character’s viewpoint, and (2) have a good idea of where you’re taking SOME aspect of the plot… then (3) themes will emerge, all on their own, to add depth & narrative coherence all on their own.
example: i had an outline in hand when i was writing chapter 15 of TWatEoAT, right. so i knew that i was at “the scene where Leanne starts charming the general populace & Niko gets anxious about her.” i knew part (2) of that equation.
so i decided that i’d write a scene with Leanne hanging out & singing with some raven hatchlings, because that seemed cute and fun to me and i think she’d be good with kids… but i realized, as i was writing, oh god this is perfect for a lot of reasons, actually.
because, see, i was pretty firmly in Leanne’s PoV at this point, and had been for a while (so, i had part (1) of that equation as well). and a preoccupation of Leanne’s, leading up to that scene, is her figuring out how she’s supposed to exert power/influence, not by having power of her own, but by influencing those around her… and i realized i could make that power a *literal thing* by having the raven kiddos’ songs enhance Leanne’s own galdrar-magic-stuff. and FURTHERMORE, it serves as an implicit foil to Reyson's arc, because Reyson’s whole problem for his chapters is that he’s been grasping too tightly to what he has, while pushing away everyone else, and since things keep slipping away from him, that just means he’s making his world smaller and colder until he’s the only one left.
i didn’t need to (consciously) think that hard about worldbuilding stuff or thematic stuff before i wrote that—most the Serenes magic stuff was strictly made up on the fly—but that’s fine, because that stuff should be complimenting the other two things anyway, and you can fill it in as needed. it felt like "magic" when i was writing it but i'd clearly set up the groundwork without realizing it.
(i suspect this is part of why e.g. NK Jemisin has said before she doesn’t know whether or not she’ll be able to finish any given novel until she has ~10-20k words of a really solid voice nailed down. voice implies a specific viewpoint; viewpoint implies a specific kind of story/plot; once you have those, the rest gets filled in.)
((incidentally i suspect this is some of my beef with the sorts of novels that e.g. nanowrimo tends to produce, or writers who generally write really fast but it feels like “nothing happens” in their stories… it always feels like “and this happened AND THEN this happened AND THEN this happened…” and that’s a weakness in a very basic kind of way, but i think the root cause is that they haven’t really inhabited any given character’s viewpoint properly? so it ends up a Sequence Of Stuff Happening. maybe. idk.))
THROW IN FUN BITS HERE AND THERE, I THINK? ESPECIALLY BIT CHARACTERS?
in TWatEoAT, when i wrote Hakna in chapter 2, i honestly did not expect to use her again. i made her cool, because if i’m going to have to have a bit character to fill in some technical information, i may as well make her FUN AS HELL, and i made Muro have a crush on her because i think it’s fun when young gents are into cougars actually. i had no further plans for either of them.
but the fact that they both existed helped me out bigtime in later chapters. when i was writing Leanne’s stuff, i was like, “damn, this is too grim/bleak/stagnant if she has no one else to talk to...” and that’s when i remembered i did have one Ancient-speaking character around, hey! what happens if she talks to Leanne?
and since i’d gone to the effort of thinking a bit about where Hakna “fit” in this world (advisor-ly type, too smart to get involved in politics, more worldly than most ravens, presumably has survived a lot of political upheaval in the past, etc), it didn’t even feel that random, slotting her in—and she started enhancing the thematic/narrative structure, all on her own. (because, well, “stuff the author personally thinks is cool” is one of many things that adds up to create a story’s theme, just by the undercurrents attached to whatever they happen to find cool, but also, if the character reflects the worldbuilding the author's already got going, and that worldbuilding is also intertwined with The Larger Thing The Author Is Trying To Say, then it’ll enhance that, too.)
and if a bit character proves truly extraneous, hey, you can always take them out or reduce their role in your next draft. it probably makes more sense to tend toward overwriting rather than underwriting with these sorts of roles.
THREE IS THE BIGGEST NUMBER
i mentioned Muro earlier. he was even more of a bit character when i first introduced him. he was the designated Kinda Dim But Perfectly Nice guy on Naesala’s council who filled in a niche in a board room meeting. ho hum.
but once i was in the post-Serenes-fire part of the story, i realized (…very early on, it looks like, based on my notes; i might’ve just intuited a lot of this rather than consciously thinking it through) that a bunch of scenes with Renzo hanging out with a convalescing Naesala would be dead on the page by themselves. there was only so much of a shit Renzo was going to give, and “you should do [x],” “i won’t,” “okay well i tried. bye forever” does not interesting narrative tension make.
but add a third person and suddenly you have a combinatorial jump in interesting possibilities. what’s Naesala think of Muro, what’s he think of Renzo, what’s he think of them *together*, what do Renzo and Muro think of each other, what are they all willing to say around the other two versus just one of them, etc. so he was *mechanically* important, just to give the other two someone to play off of, and then that section kinda wrote itself. (and Muro took on way more of a life of his own, as a result, which was a wonderful and happy surprise.)
anyway, i recently had a chat with a Very Accomplished Author who suggested something similar when i was trying to debug an origfic novel outline i’m working on, and it totally blew my mind because omg the new possibilities! and she was just like. yeah. three is an incredibly powerful number. a triangle is an incredibly powerful shape. yes love triangles are annoying but there’s a reason there’s so many of them!!!
okay those are the three formalisms i came up with. but i guess i’ll mention the other one that i did not come up with, but which i use all the time:
GIVE YOUR READERS WHAT THEY’RE EXPECTING, BUT NOT THE WAY THEY EXPECT IT
this is probably kind of basic bitch advice, but it’s my most reliable “tool” for fixing a plot, a sort of Swiss army knife that i reach for over and over. if i’m staring at a thing, and i don’t know what should happen next, i’m like “okay what would a random reader think is going to happen,” and then i ask “how can i do that exact thing, but with a twist.” this maxim's vagueness is where it gets a lot of its power! you can use this for everything from “planning a huge massive twist in your heist outcome” to “how can i make this random filler board meeting scene at least slightly unusual/interesting.”
(i got this tip from a very highfalutin MFA-instructor type who wrote very quiet stories where almost nothing happens, btw, hahaha. his class was great overall but i think this was the single best tip i got out of it tbh)
examples of when i’ve used this trick off the top my head:
* in a recent origfic short i wrote, it looks like the skrunky little underling is going to go assassinate someone to solve a “problem,” but it turns out he just uses blackmail instead. (he’s being very GRIM going into this—he’s not a guy used to doing sketchy stuff!—so when he's FREAKING OUT and BUILDING HIMSELF UP TO DO THE THING, we assume he’s about to do a Violence. but he’s also a shy nerd who Knows Too Much, so it totally makes sense that he’d figure out some cool shy nerd way to deal with the problem, e.g. blackmail.)
* in a different origfic novella, i’m building up a thing the whole time where these two young temple acolytes are bonding, and the dude!acolyte is constantly bitching about how he’d like to escape the temple, and the chick!acolyte is more uncertain about it, but is pretty on board with Whatever This Dude Says. so the reader’s expecting them to eventually find a way to escape, and probably expecting something to go wrong… but they don’t necessarily expect that *he’s* going to be the one to balk. she finds a way out and he's like "uhhh... actually... i kind of like it here... it's not THAT bad..." turns out this dude is all talk; turns out he’s too much of a wimpy coward to actually *do* anything about the thing he’s bitching about, and it's a big turn!
do these seem like obvious outs to you? MAYBE. but i needed to think through them this way, at least a little bit, so.
okay, that's the end of cringe writing advice from a random internet fanfiction person, you may resume your normal reading pages now :P
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Date: 2024-10-31 01:11 am (UTC)Yeah, I agree. Or, in some cases, "think about the novel that made you mad and think really hard why it made you mad."
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Date: 2024-10-31 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-10-31 01:17 am (UTC)love hearing the rest, and nodding! powerful advice, tucking it in the trenchcoat for later too. it's fun seeing the muscles that a longer novel will hone versus shorter ones.
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Date: 2024-10-31 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-04 03:07 am (UTC)i do sincerely believe the correct answer for most writing questions is “go read a novel that does it well & think about it really hard,” and there’s no real shortcut around that
100%!! This is my favorite way to troubleshoot something, or at least if I'm trying to get the ball-rolling with a particular kind of flavor/theme/situation, looking for an example of it that I've enjoyed and that I can absorb through osmosis and distill is very handy.
I *love* trios, coughcough none speaks, none heeds and coughcough this FFXVI fic I've been working on is also fairly trio-centric. There's so much more room for play!
This might be a bizarre question, but when you're considering "audience" do you include yourself in that? Like, with fanfic I have a very singular expectation for any potential readers and I place myself at the helm of that crowd (I want to "wow!" myself), but aside from that I'm so interested in leaning into whatever niche I'm curious about, even if I'm like potentially betraying what a reader might expect / hope will happen? Might be irrelevant because fanfic is so self-indulgent by nature, right, and I assume you're describing putting yourself in the reader's mindset as the tool... Idk! I had thoughts recently about whether origfic and fanfic advice ever diverge from each other? This is probably a very obvious "yes" in only some ways haha. Where was I going with this.
Tl;dr fun post, thank yeh!
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Date: 2024-11-05 08:42 pm (UTC)oh huh that's an INTERESTING question...
my instinctive answer is "yeah probably," if only on the basis of, like... i do go back and reread my old fics! and i'm often surprised—even older stuff that has more rough edges, and isn't of the quality i'd expect from myself now... it often still works because it has a lot of the sorts of things i like! and even if it's handled inexpertly it's there and i get a lot of joy out of that.
and even in origfic... i don't often think about any audience other than myself until relatively late in the game. (e.g. when i got a personalized rejection on that one novella that was like "this reads like YA," i was like... ok, that's not what i was going for, but i do see why you'd THINK that, and i can definitely see how i'd expand this out into a full-on YA novel if i wanted to... but i simply Did Not Want The Story To Be That. so i didn't. lol. probably would've been better if i'd known that upfront and been shooting more clearly for my audience but rip whatever)
my buddy who makes a living doing self-published mysteries, now, there is a guy who's very consciously thinking about his audience at all times—he has all the data from who clicks on his Facebook ads, he knows he's writing mysteries targeted at mostly older ladies, etc. and he does have to make some choices on that basis—the one that was so shocking to me, because i blogged about it a while back, was the bit where apparently readers in that genre feel VERY STRONGLY about no profanity? ("fuck," said i, the resident sailor-mouth.) but idk, even with him, when he talks about what he's writing, he's still doing stuff that's fundamentally interesting to him and the sort of thing he'd want to read—he watched Succession and thought it was so fun he was like "how can i build the next thing in my murder-mystery series to be kind of like writing an episode of Succession," so that's what he's doing now.
the times when i consciously try to back away from thinking about just me is when i'm worried about being too self-indulgent... and i think in general it's better to be more self-indulgent than less but there's times when less is definitely called for. (e.g., in my Tellius longfic, i would've loved to have more stuff about the hawk tribes, but there simply wasn't a way to do it without committing Pacing Crimes. also, uh, i had to cut.... more than one... superfluous Naesala-getting-whumped-scene... because it did not serve the overall story... but i did... like those scenes... l o l) ((in origfic the classic way i fall into this trap is trying to put Too Much Of My Research on the page, e.g. the Martin Luther thingy i'm vaguely working on is probably going to get substantial cuts where i'm just going on about "hey here's fun historical facts," and again... i must avoid committing pacing crimes... lol))
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Date: 2024-11-11 12:37 am (UTC)It totally makes sense that if you're working genre-specific there's a necessity to think about audience and that that is going to shape whatever your personal interests are too to some extent, but that's cool that he's found a way to work within that (lol Succession inspo, NICE). LMAO I do remember that post about no profanity actually. XD
the times when i consciously try to back away from thinking about just me is when i'm worried about being too self-indulgent... and there simply wasn't a way to do it without committing Pacing Crimes
This all makes sense! I do this as well. Thank you for the thorough response hahaha! <3
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